Miles received a subscription to a Steve Spangler Science experiment box for Christmas (courtesy of his aunt and uncle), and today we cracked open the first box. Miles was extremely excited to venture into this mysterious world of science, while I was on edge as the box revealed what would certainly be the high-potential-for-complete-mess contents within.
Sure enough, I was right — the box contained test tubes and plenty of dye tablets for color experimentation. So the first thing I did was create a lab space and stress (REALLY stress) the importance of care and precision when it comes to experimentation.
With the proper safety measures in place, we divided tasks as all good lab partners do, with Miles taking care of the dye tablets and me taking point on any and all aspects involving the pouring of liquid. Miles marveled as the water in his first test tube turned his favorite color.
Crossing the colored tubes and holding them up to the light, Miles watched the primary colors create secondary colors. During the second part of the experiment, Miles mixed color tablets.
His hypothesis: yellow and blue would combine to make green, red and yellow would make orange, and blue and red would make…”I don’t know” (Miles settled on brown). Well, what good is a science experiment if you don’t learn anything, right?
Eventually, Miles’s natural tendency towards mad science started to take over, as he crammed all three color tablets into a tube with water and vegetable oil, creating a bubbly pitch black ooze that looked like the Venom symbiote.
Miles was so happy with his first foray into the scientific method that he repeated everything for Jaclyn when she was finished grocery shopping. We still have about half of the experiments left to complete, so there are more Adventures in Science!TM forthcoming!
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